Invisibility Cloak
by Deathly Noted
Summary: When Mello quits the Mafia and continues the Kira case with only Matt’s assistance, their relationship simplifies as much as it complicates... with repercussions for the whole world. MelloxMatt.
1. Chemical Reaction

Matt woke up with a hangover so bad he couldn't remember how he had gotten the hangover in the first place, and Mello was going to be displeased, he knew… but he could worry about that after he puked.

…Now, where was the bathroom again…?

He soon gave up on finding the elusive room and instead emptied the contents of his stomach into a nearby wastebin. With some of the offending chemicals expelled, he felt a bit better, but he was still dizzy-drowsy as he stumbled back to the couch and collapsed onto the cushions, and he suspected he was doped up on something, but for the life of him he couldn't remember _what_. Furthermore, his confused state of mind prevented him from analyzing his symptoms and providing effective treatment for himself, leaving him at something of a miserable impasse. Maybe Mello could help when he got back from wherever, if he didn't kill him first…

"Matt, it fucking reeks in here."

Speak of the devil.

"Hey, can you bring me some aspirin or something?" he called out in response. This headache was blowing his brain to bits, and surely two more measly pills wouldn't damage his system.

"Get it yourself." Mello appeared in the doorway, smirking, doubtlessly feeling amused and empowered by the dynamics of this situation. "Did you get in a bar fight?"

"Eh?"

"You're bleeding," Mello pointed out, and when Matt pressed a hand to his face he felt a stinging sensation and found his fingers coated crimson.

"Maybe…" Matt mused.

Now Mello looked slightly alarmed. Good, thought Matt. Perhaps Mello would take pity on him and go get some aspirin from the mysterious vanishing bathroom.

"Are you on something?" Mello accused.

"Probably. I don't really remember," he admitted without the focus to feel much shame. His world was currently narrowed down to the sickness and pain. "Can you bring me something? I feel sick, man. I can barely walk."

The only response he received was Mello seizing his chin, inspecting him from face to throat, down, down, until suddenly Mello was tearing at his belt.

"What the—?" Matt half sat up but promptly fell back, seeing a spiral in his mind. "Cut it out. I'm sick." Neither Matt nor Mello were paying attention to the complaints, only to the constraints Mello was removing one by one, to the jeans sliding down over bruised hips, and then Mello was staring at him horrified and furious and Matt didn't understand. "Mello… what are you…?"

With uncharacteristic tenderness, Mello re-dressed him, yet a grimace still twisted his features and as the belt buckle latched into place, he spat, "You were drugged, Matt. Date raped."

Once, twice, three times Matt blinked, however, his vision and mind remained clouded over, the words 'date raped' echoing around meaninglessly in his skull.

"I would remember something like that," was his reasoning, but the slur of his speech gave the statement little credibility even to himself.

"That's the whole point of date rape, Matt. The victim isn't supposed to remember," Mello snapped.

"Oh. Right."

"But I want you to tell me what you _do_ remember, so I can find the bastard who did this to you, okay?" With a smile sugar-sweet, Mello knelt down on the floor beside him, running fingers through his hair and massaging his aching scalp in a rare display of affection. Matt smiled back and leaned into the caress. "Let's start with the last time we saw each other. I left to take care of a deal, and you were on the computer. What happened after that?"

"Smoked, made some ramen… and…"

Impatient as ever, Mello prompted, "What?" and his wide-eyed expectancy triggered a memory inside Matt's mind.

"There was something I had to tell you. Something… important." But of course, he couldn't remember what that something was. The story skipped ahead, "I looked for you inside the club, but you weren't there," and rewound, "The car would barely start."

"Matt. Focus. Who did you talk to? Names, descriptions, anything."

"I dunno… I asked your guys where you were, and I can't really remember after that."

For a split second Mello's fingers dug almost painfully into his scalp, and then just as quickly the fingers were gone and the blond was pacing at a dizzying speed around the room, muttering to himself, "I'm gonna kill them all. I'm gonna slit their fucking throats," and variations thereof over and over.

"_Goddamn-fucking-shit!_" Mello screamed suddenly, kicking an end table over and sending a flurry of papers into the air like snow, glass shattering like ice on the floor and crunching under his boots as he continued to walk around in circles.

"_Oh_… you think…?" Matt said with dawning comprehension.

"I know." Coldly intoned, without a backward glance. "This is why I didn't want to get you involved. This is why I wanted you to stay at Wammy's House."

The words fell onto Matt like rain, memory after stinging memory of that day, and he had to make Mello understand, before he left again.

"I don't care about the rape," he spoke solidly, because it was the truth. He only cared about Mello. "I don't care, so just forget about it. Compared to your work, this is meaningless, so—" A startled gasp broke through his sentence as Mello rounded on him, and those pitch black eyes were glaring so maliciously and murderously that, although Mello had never raised a hand to him before, Matt couldn't help but close his eyes tight and wait for him to strike. The impact, however, never came; only the words, "Don't you dare call it meaningless," gravelish and vicious but somehow afflicted, and Matt's eyes crept open to find Mello walking away in an echo of that day, that day, _that day_.

Jolting upright, Matt ignored his nausea in favor of his hysteria, calling out, "Don't go;" struggling to stand, pleading even as the bile rose up in his throat, "I can fix it, I can fix it, I can;" and then he was hunched over, vomiting on the floor. By the end of it, he didn't know if he was dry heaving or gasping from anxiety, if his eyes were watering reflexively or shedding desperate tears, but when he felt Mello's steady hand on his shoulder… somehow, the world stopped shaking, though what Mello said next should have shocked him more than anything: "Relax. I'm just packing our things. We're going back to England."

* * *

**A/N:** Oh, AU, I love you. This isn't an angst thing about Matt being raped, by the way — it's about Mello and Matt kicking ass! I'll be posting an afterlife MelloxMatt serial tomorrow, then a one-shot (do you guys prefer crack or serious stuff?), and then updating Ad Hominem, if you were wondering about my schedule. Thank you so much for your support. 


	2. Nothing and Everything

To all appearances, Mello was enjoying their first class seats to the fullest when he tipped his head back, sighed, and stretched out his legs, swirling his half-finished glass of champagne with languid twists of the wrist.

Matt knew better. This was the first time he had ever seen Mello drink, and he really couldn't blame him when four years long spent struggling up through the Mafia's ranks, making plans, and gathering resources had all just evaporated into thin air…

"_Yes?_" Mello asked pointedly, calling him out on his umpteenth sneaky glance that actually wasn't all that sneaky when they were sitting elbow-to-elbow.

Remarkably, Matt maintained his composure, uttering simply, "It's nothing," and continuing to mash the buttons on his handheld. He was paying so little attention to which buttons he was pressing, however, that it was Game Over in mere moments, a visual representation of his own state of discomfit he hoped Mello hadn't noticed. Another glance determined that Mello's eyes were closed to the world, yet rather than acknowledging just how lucky he was and returning to his game, Matt found himself staring, opening his mouth to speak against his better judgement, "Um, Mello?"

"What?"

Mello hadn't opened his eyes, but even so, Matt choked on the words he wanted to say, feeling overly exposed. "I…" _I'm sorry._ "Nevermind," he finished lamely, and ignoring the strange look Mello gave him, he turned back to his handheld, reset it, and began browsing through his self-designed console's capabilities: chess, GPS, video phone, internet access… notepad.

His message to Mello ended up short yet carefully worded, as was Matt's style, but to his surprise, it was also more of an expression of gratitude than apology. At the heart of this situation, somehow, he was _happy_. Happy and crazy enough to wake Mello from sleep, twitchy and half-inebriated, and maybe then Matt felt more stupid than anything, but he needed to get his feelings across somehow, validate them, or else they would stagnate and suffocate him.

"Just let me sleep, okay?" grumbled Mello, swatting irritably in Matt's general direction. The gamer took this as an opportunity to shove the console off into Mello's unsuspecting hands and occupy his own with a piece of pocket lint.

The following minute ticked silently by, an agitated twitch in his fingers keeping time, and Matt waited, waited for the bomb to explode… but Mello merely dropped the handheld onto Matt's lap. Matt blinked confusedly between the console's screen and Mello, who had abandoned his glass of champagne on the dining tray and thrown an arm up over his eyes, until he spotted the anomaly in the scene. To the message he had originally written, _I'm glad we're going home.__ I just wish it could be under better circumstances,_ Mello had attached the line, _Don't worry about it. Together, we can win_. Matt couldn't help but grin.

* * *

It was raining when they arrived, but in Matt's mind it seemed like it was always raining in England and never in L.A., so the end effect was more homey than gloomy. The calming scenery could hardly quash the jitters of his god-knows-how-many-hours-it's-been-now cigarette withdrawal, however. 

"Mello, please tell me you packed my cigarettes," Matt said, suddenly apprehensive, as they neared the exit. At the time, he had been grateful to Mello for taking care of all the packing and other loose ends in L.A. while he got some much-needed rest, but knowing Mello, the only thing he packed was _chocolate_.

"Oops. I forgot," Mello deadpanned.

"Sure, you 'forgot', just like it was an 'accident' when you knocked them off the balcony. You're so full of it," he tried to sound reprimanding, but the memory made him smile. "Guess I'll just have to bum one off a cute blonde Brit, eh?"

The response Mello gave, "You should quit," was spoken in the same monotonous drone, but his ill humor was palpable.

They walked the rest of the way outside in silence, where Matt ended up asking a middle-aged man for a cigarette because he was the only smoker in sight. As Matt took his first drag, however, what should have been bliss was tainted by the startling realization that Mello was gone. His heart constricted painfully, then his lungs, in a chain reaction paralysis that led to him coughing and the man chuckling, asking, "This your first cigarette?"

Matt didn't respond; he was already moving, searching, pushing through the crowd lingering beneath the overhang until he was standing out in the rain, face-to-face with Mello in the back of a cab, and—

Mello pushed the door open, calling out irritably, "Hurry up."

Walking over and bowing down at the door, Matt asked, "Can I smoke?" more for the sake of normalcy than craving at this point. His frame was soaked through with the rain and a trace of cold sweat, and it made him feel unbearably dried out inside.

"No," Mello and the cab driver said in unison.

Sighing, Matt leaned in to take one last breath of slow death, only to find that his cigarette had been doused. What shocked his senses even more was the sound of Mello _laughing_, until a glance inside the cab confirmed that the snickering was indeed directed at his misery. Mello, sadist and cigarette-hater of the century, _would_ find this situation rather humorous.

Matt was just glad to see Mello out of his slump, even if it was at his expense.

The impotent cigarette was flicked to the curb as Matt clambered into the backseat next to Mello, who promptly began to retreat to the far left side of the vehicle, though Matt made a point of shaking out his hair before his friend got very far. Water droplets clashed against leather with a crisp plitter-platter, and Matt's revenge had been successfully executed at the expense of incurring Mello's wrath.

"Ugh! You damn wet dog! Get in your corner!" Mello cursed, the sole of his boot connecting with Matt's thigh and pushing him to the opposite side of the car. A mutual glare was exchanged for a moment but quickly converted to a roguish grin on Matt's part as he shoved Mello's feet to the floor, and Mello smirked in turn as he moved to retaliate.

An indiscreet cough from the front of the cab prevented their fight from progressing further. Matt stared at Mello, frozen in place until the other turned to face the cab driver and Matt likewise cast his gaze away, out the window to observe the rain and the bustling airport scene.

This wasn't the first time they had been scolded by a stranger for their antics, but it still made Matt uncomfortable, perhaps even more so because it happened so frequently. When they went out in public together, strange and disapproving looks were a regular occurrence; whispers. It was something Matt tried not to analyze or else his life would start falling apart at the seams. Mello never seemed fazed by it — he liked attention, and unless his superiority was being questioned, even negative attention didn't provoke him — but Matt preferred to blend into the background if at all possible, which it never really was with Mello around. He was consistently pushed past his comfort zone into Mello's emotional world, a world only Matt was privileged enough to be shown, and even if what Matt saw there frightened him or brought him pain, god, it was better than the hollowness he had known.

"Where are you blokes headed?"

"Winchester. I'm hungry, so take us somewhere classy, somewhere like…" Mello paused, then bewilderingly concluded his sentence with, "A pizzeria."

It was only when Mello looked at him, head cocked slightly as if seeking approval, that Matt realized just what was going on. Mello was trying to do something nice for him. Matt was happy, but at the same time, something kept him from smiling.

'You don't have to be nice to me just because of the rape. Nothing's changed,' Matt gestured discreetly, on the off chance that the cab driver could understand Signed English. He was probably being paranoid, but he couldn't really be blamed when Wammy's House had encouraged the trait in his already secretive personality.

'Would you rather go for fish and chips?' Mello signed back, eyes widening inquiringly, though neither was partial to fish and chips. This was his odd idea of a compromise: finding a situation in which both of them would be miserable rather than content.

Matt rolled his eyes, smiling despite himself as he responded, 'Pizza is fine.'

'Damn right it is.'

The question of pride thus satisfied, the rest of the drive passed in companionable silence, and by coincidence or fate, they ended up at a restaurant they had visited once before. Matt liked to think it was fate when Mello led them to the same booth they had used all those years ago, tucked away in the back corner where no one would overhear their conversation, however trivial. They even defaulted into the same positions, with Mello's arms thrown over the back of the seat and Matt's forearms resting on the table, and ordered the same dishes.

"Nothing's changed," Matt said again, more to himself than anything, but Mello responded anyway.

"Nothing and everything."

* * *

**A/N:** Next chapter, Mello and Matt at Wammy's House. I'm in a bit of a slump myself, so reviews would be helpful. 


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